Twice-told tales
The sunshine flashed after them into the apartment, but left it
somewhat gloomy as they closed the door. Their eyes were immediately
attracted to their portraits, which rested against the farthest wall of
the room. At the first glance through the dim light and the distance,
seeing themselves in precisely their natural attitudes and with all the
air that they recognized so well, they uttered a simultaneous
exclamation of delight.
“There we stand,” cried Walter, enthusiastically, “fixed in sunshine
for ever. No dark passions can gather on our faces.”
“No,” said Elinor, more calmly; “no dreary change can sadden us.”
This was said while they were approaching and had yet gained only an
imperfect view of the pictures. The painter, after saluting them,
busied himself at a table in completing a crayon sketch, leaving his
visitors to form their own judgment as to his perfected labors. At
intervals he sent a glance from beneath his deep eyebrows, watching
their countenances in profile with his pencil suspended over the
sketch. They had now stood some moments, each in front of the other’s
picture, contemplating it with entranced attention, but without
uttering a word. At length Walter stepped forward, then back, viewing
Elinor’s portrait in various lights, and finally spoke.
“Is there not a change?” said he, in a doubtful and meditative tone.
“Yes; the perception of it grows more vivid the longer I look. It is
certainly the same picture that I saw yesterday; the dress, the
features, all are the same, and yet something is altered.”
“Is, then, the picture less like than it was yesterday?” inquired the
painter, now drawing near with irrepressible interest.
“The features are perfect Elinor,” answered Walter, “and at the first
glance the expression seemed also hers; but I could fancy that the
portrait has changed countenance while I have been looking at it. The
eyes are fixed on mine with a strangely sad and anxious expression.
Nay, it is grief and terror. Is this like Elinor?”
“Compare the living face with the pictured one,” said the painter.
Walter glanced sidelong at his mistress, and started. Motionless and
absorbed, fascinated, as it were, in contemplation of Walter’s
portrait, Elinor’s face had assumed precisely the expression of which
he had just been complaining. Had she practised for whole hours before
a mirror, she could not have caught the look so successfully. Had the
picture itself been a mirror, it could not have thrown back her present
aspect with stronger and more melancholy truth. She appeared quite
unconscious of the dialogue between the artist and her lover.
“Elinor,” exclaimed Walter, in amazement, “what change has come over
you?”
She did not hear him nor desist from her fixed gaze till he seized her
hand, and thus attracted her notice; then with a sudden tremor she
looked from the picture to the face of the original.
“Do you see no change in your portrait?” asked she.
“In mine? None,” replied Walter, examining it. “But let me see. Yes;
there is a slight change—an improvement, I think, in the picture,
though none in the likeness. It has a livelier expression than
yesterday, as if some bright thought were flashing from the eyes and
about to be uttered from the lips. Now that I have caught the look, it
becomes very decided.”
While he was intent on these observations Elinor turned to the painter.
She regarded him with grief and awe, and felt that he repaid her with
sympathy and commiseration, though wherefore she could but vaguely
guess.
“That look!” whispered she, and shuddered. “How came it there?”
“Madam,” said the painter, sadly, taking her hand and leading her
apart, “in both these pictures I have painted what I saw. The
artist—the true artist—must look beneath the exterior. It is his
gift—his proudest, but often a melancholy one—to see the inmost soul,
and by a power indefinable even to himself to make it glow or darken
upon the canvas in glances that express the thought and sentiment of
years. Would that I might convince myself of error in the present
instance!”
They had now approached the table, on which were heads in chalk, hands
almost as expressive as ordinary faces, ivied church-towers, thatched
cottages, old thunder-stricken trees, Oriental and antique costume, and
all such picturesque vagaries of an artist’s idle moments. Turning them
over with seeming carelessness, a crayon sketch of two figures was
disclosed.
“If I have failed,” continued he—“if your heart does not see itself
reflected in your own portrait, if you have no secret cause to trust my
delineation of the other—it is not yet too late to alter them. I might
change the action of these figures too. But would it influence the
event?” He directed her notice to the sketch.
A thrill ran through Elinor’s frame; a shriek was upon her lips, but
she stifled it with the self-command that becomes habitual to all who
hide thoughts of fear and anguish within their bosoms. Turning from the
table, she perceived that Walter had advanced near enough to have seen
the sketch, though she could not determine whether it had caught his
eye.
“We will not have the pictures altered,” said she, hastily. “If mine is
sad, I shall but look the gayer for the contrast.”
“Be it so,” answered the painter, bowing. “May your griefs be such
fanciful ones that only your pictures may mourn for them! For your
joys, may they be true and deep, and paint themselves upon this lovely
face till it quite belie my art!”
After the marriage of Walter and Elinor the pictures formed the two
most splendid ornaments of their abode. They hung side by side,
separated by a narrow panel, appearing to eye each other constantly,
yet always returning the gaze of the spectator. Travelled gentlemen who
professed a knowledge of such subjects reckoned these among the most
admirable specimens of modern portraiture, while common observers
compared them with the originals, feature by feature, and were
rapturous in praise of the likeness. But it was on a third
class—neither travelled connoisseurs nor common observers, but people
of natural sensibility—that the pictures wrought their strongest
effect. Such persons might gaze carelessly at first, but, becoming
interested, would return day after day and study these painted faces
like the pages of a mystic volume. Walter Ludlow’s portrait attracted
their earliest notice. In the absence of himself and his bride they
sometimes disputed as to the expression which the painter had intended
to throw upon the features, all agreeing that there was a look of
earnest import, though no two explained it alike. There was less
diversity of opinion in regard to Elinor’s picture. They differed,
indeed, in their attempts to estimate the nature and depth of the gloom
that dwelt upon her face, but agreed that it was gloom and alien from
the natural temperament of their youthful friend. A certain fanciful
person announced as the result of much scrutiny that both these
pictures were parts of one design, and that the melancholy strength of
feeling in Elinor’s countenance bore reference to the more vivid
emotion—or, as he termed it, the wild passion—in that of Walter. Though
unskilled in the art, he even began a sketch in which the action of the
two figures was to correspond with their mutual expression.
It was whispered among friends that day by day Elinor’s face was
assuming a deeper shade of pensiveness which threatened soon to render
her too true a counterpart of her melancholy picture. Walter, on the
other hand, instead of acquiring the vivid look which the painter had
given him on the canvas, became reserved and downcast, with no outward
flashes of emotion, however it might be smouldering within. In course
of time Elinor hung a gorgeous curtain of purple silk wrought with
flowers and fringed with heavy golden tassels before the pictures,
under pretence that the dust would tarnish their hues or the light dim
them. It was enough. Her visitors felt that the massive folds of the
silk must never be withdrawn nor the portraits mentioned in her
presence.
Time wore on, and the painter came again. He had been far enough to the
north to see the silver cascade of the Crystal Hills, and to look over
the vast round of cloud and forest from the summit of New England’s
loftiest mountain. But he did not profane that scene by the mockery of
his art. He had also lain in a canoe on the bosom of Lake George,
making his soul the mirror of its loveliness and grandeur till not a
picture in the Vatican was more vivid than his recollection. He had
gone with the Indian hunters to Niagara, and there, again, had flung
his hopeless pencil down the precipice, feeling that he could as soon
paint the roar as aught else that goes to make up the wondrous
cataract. In truth, it was seldom his impulse to copy natural scenery
except as a framework for the delineations of the human form and face,
instinct with thought, passion or suffering. With store of such his
adventurous ramble had enriched him. The stern dignity of Indian
chiefs, the dusky loveliness of Indian girls, the domestic life of
wigwams, the stealthy march, the battle beneath gloomy pine trees, the
frontier fortress with its garrison, the anomaly of the old French
partisan bred in courts, but grown gray in shaggy deserts,—such were
the scenes and portraits that he had sketched. The glow of perilous
moments, flashes of wild feeling, struggles of fierce power, love,
hate, grief, frenzy—in a word, all the worn-out heart of the old
earth—had been revealed to him under a new form. His portfolio was
filled with graphic illustrations of the volume of his memory which
genius would transmute into its own substance and imbue with
immortality. He felt that the deep wisdom in his art which he had
sought so far was found.
But amid stern or lovely nature, in the perils of the forest or its
overwhelming peacefulness, still there had been two phantoms, the
companions of his way. Like all other men around whom an engrossing
purpose wreathes itself, he was insulated from the mass of humankind.
He had no aim, no pleasure, no sympathies, but what were ultimately
connected with his art. Though gentle in manner and upright in intent
and action, he did not possess kindly feelings; his heart was cold: no
living creature could be brought near enough to keep him warm. For
these two beings, however, he had felt in its greatest intensity the
sort of interest which always allied him to the subjects of his pencil.
He had pried into their souls with his keenest insight and pictured the
result upon their features with his utmost skill, so as barely to fall
short of that standard which no genius ever reached, his own severe
conception. He had caught from the duskiness of the future—at least, so
he fancied—a fearful secret, and had obscurely revealed it on the
portraits. So much of himself—of his imagination and all other
powers—had been lavished on the study of Walter and Elinor that he
almost regarded them as creations of his own, like the thousands with
which he had peopled the realms of Picture. Therefore did they flit
through the twilight of the woods, hover on the mist of waterfalls,
look forth from the mirror of the lake, nor melt away in the noontide
sun. They haunted his pictorial fancy, not as mockeries of life nor
pale goblins of the dead, but in the guise of portraits, each with an
unalterable expression which his magic had evoked from the caverns of
the soul. He could not recross the Atlantic till he had again beheld
the originals of those airy pictures.
“O glorious Art!” Thus mused the enthusiastic painter as he trod the
street. “Thou art the image of the Creator’s own. The innumerable forms
that wander in nothingness start into being at thy beck. The dead live